Fedora News Updates #11

This is the eleventh issue of the Fedora News Updates. Some
newsworthy things with regards to external development have cropped up,
it being picked up by some news feeds out there. Of highlights this
time around is the message from the Fedora Project Leader, as well as
from the Fedora Legacy Project Leader.

A message from the Project Leader

For the past few months, the main task on the ever-lengthy Fedora to-do
list, is to open up some form of public repository for contributors to
the Fedora Project.

The main issue here is that we're looking for a usable source code
management (SCM) system, that can scale well for a large project like
ours. Please bear with us, as we would like to get this right on the
first try. As you can imagine, changing the internal build system and
code management repositories have massive repercussions on our
development process and breakages can falter our Red Hat Enterprise
Linux deliverables.

Thanks for understanding.

Cristian Gafton
Fedora Project Leader

Fedora Core 2 test3 released

The third and final test release of Fedora Core 2 has been released,
with the release message at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg02693.html.
Yes, SELinux is now disabled by default, meaning Fedora Core 2 will not
have it enabled by default. A few more interesting fixes like CD1 not
booting and new translations have made it into this test release.

It should be noted that the FC2 Final freeze date is approaching - all
packages should in theory be
built by the end of the working day on the 6th of May.

A message from the Fedora Legacy Lead

We have a resurgence of interest in the project, most likely due to
RHL9 becoming EOL. We also have a new dedicated download server
in place, and as DNS updates users will be directed to that new
server. There are a bunch of mirror requests that have been
submitted over the last month or so, that we have not processed due to
bandwidth issues, these will now be processed. Our mirror system
will continue to grow.

There are a large number of pending updates, and newly created bug
reports with packages up for initial QA. We can use all the help
we can get to QA these packages so that we can push them into
updates-testing, and finally updates. Some of these include RHL9
packages. Some very helpful folks at Red Hat have offered their
help with keeping some packages updated, which is going to turn out to
be a huge service to the project.

Finally, there has been some talk of making Fedora Legacy a non-profit
organization. Initial reaction by some folks at Red Hat has been
favorable, but Red Hat Legal has to get involved. Who knows how
long this will take, or which direction it will go, but I will continue
to pursue this transition.

Jesse Keating
Fedora Legacy Project Leader

Dual-head AGP video cards that "just work"

So you're in the market for a new video card, and want to make sure all
that money you spend doesn't go to waste - i.e. it will work flawlessly
with Fedora. Matthew Polashek asked just that and there were some good
recommendations:

Matrox cards get the juice for being easy
to setup, while they have hardware acceleration, it doesn't
scale to that of nvidia's. But Chris Manning runs a Matrox
tri-head, and finds that it works just fine.

The nvidia GeForce FX 5700 has been given a thumbs
up, as has the GeForce
MX 4000 though with nvidia's binary only drivers.

Taming the mailing lists

Sopwith sent out a mailing
list reminder to all, to make sure people post to the correct
lists. Reiterating this more is important - end-users don't want to be
filling random cruft on the developer only mailing lists, or assuming
they're testing a release, on the Core lists. User discretion is
advised, and remember to always search the mailing list archives! These
and many more, came out of the "Taming
the mailing lists?" thread.

FedoraNEWS.ORG gets translated

Thomas Chung has kindly pointed out that the FedoraNEWS.ORG website
currently has a site translation, available in French. It should also be
noted that there are many more translations available,
including Russian, Italian, Spanish, and German.

Some new documentation

Dave Pawson has been working on the Connecting to a
Palm document, which is a step-by-step guide for getting syncing
working.

Fedora Core 2 test3 notes

Why do we have 4 CDs now, rather than just 3 CDs? And why are we
not making each individual ISO larger, as 700MB discs are becoming
common-place? Sopwith mentioned that this has been tried
before, with negative results, and Stephen Smoogen mentions that
this might be a
possibility in FC3.

Kernel 351+ merges Markus Lidel's I2O patches that are currently in 2.6.6-rc3-mm2. Testing is needed for Adaptec and DPT SCSI RAID hardware that previously used the dpt_i2o driver in the 2.4.x kernels. More details about I20 development is available at http://i2o.shadowconnect.com/.